This is wonderful news. As a "mail carrier" for US govt they should be made a branch of Post Service and then under Trump benevolent guidance and DOGE goals the department can be cut down to 3 people and a laptop. Billions in Gov subsidies saved right there. Done.
Make it so.
In the 80s I worked on BPCS, an early ERP system, and yes it was coded in RPG2, and RPG3. Mind blowingly hard to understand the source code but I credit my efforts then with later finding AWK so easy and logical. IBM had also just brought out the baby System36 which looked like a PC beige box but was actually a minified s/36 if I recall correctly. Didn't sell well. Then there was RPG for DOS which I heard of but didn't use.
If the authors client had been using an RPG accounting system for 40 years then it might be BPCS and there were tools out there to convert RPG to other less traumatic languages.
But fascinating article nonetheless and brought back memories of being an apps programmer. I also remember those dongles. Really fun when you had multiple apps with their own dongles and only one port.
Please share as I would like to see what you have built.
What I like about this is that ides of a catalog which is what most business systems have in the form of their records and objects. Giving an AI accessible structure to this gets AI into the realm of the various 4GLs back in late 90s which made user created forms so much easier. Anybody remember that Informix 4GL for building simple apps from the db schema?
Reality bites. JS devs have tried to use JS for everything and found limits. It isn't a one language to rule the all. Welcome back to the world of needing the right tools for the job.
Don't underestimate prototyping nature of js that allowed for exporing design space at higher speed throughout the years.
Reminds me when I was working on distributed filesystem at LiveDrive more than 10 years ago, wrote working prototype and few iterations in Ruby before rewriting it in C - somebody said "(you did it) because Ruby was slow/crap?", I said "no, because Ruby was essential (to do it quick)".
Also interop with those tools (though wasm) is relatively new.
Js/ts ecosystem is actually quite nice now with this option to use wasm for performance - while still keeping "works on the server and in the browser" intact.
> JS devs have tried to use JS for everything and found limits
Yeah, seems NodeJS kind of made some people into JS-zealots, while us web developers have thought of separation of concerns from the beginning, hence the holy trinity of HTML, JS and CSS. Glad others are catching up with web developers for once :)
As a lifelong procrastinator this article reads like "that other Napoleon" aka Eisenhower and his "delegate" for anything neither important nor urgent. I use it when I'm one of several recipients in emails To: address.
Other responders have also talked about Google inbox which I never used but even those of use locked away in enterprise fiefdoms with Outlook can make use of pinned messages (same as starting in Google Inbox) and recently also can be reminded about emails. I use both combined with the approach of trying to clear my inbox as close to zero unread each day as possible. I do same to slack messages as well. For all "messages" I ruthlessly delete or archive anything not needing action and with no legal or revenue impact.
THats how I manage the torrent of comms. Need to improve my work on larger items to start earlier and produce in smaller chunks.
For keeping track of all my work I used Obsidian with tasks and tags and put due dates on all. Helps me see what is due for each "project".
Great article. I think of AI when considering where and how to use as Automated Intelligence and when thinking about risk AI can also mean Accelerated Incompetence. Which end of this scale you end up on depends on taking the hype or systems thinking approach to the opportunity/problem being addressed.
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